


only so much breathing can do

by enjolrolo



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: (brief) - Freeform, Angst, Canon-typical Alcohol Consumption, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hockey players being bad at feeling things and then expressing those things, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Substance Abuse, Panic Attacks, Sensory Overload, Vomiting, kegster, only slight but you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-06 06:40:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17340467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enjolrolo/pseuds/enjolrolo
Summary: Jack is really bad at parties. Case in point: he's sitting in his room upstairs, having a meltdown after three beers, and it's only 10 PM.





	only so much breathing can do

Jack hears, muffled, through the door,  _ Don’t go in there, Zimmermann is having a fucking meltdown _ , and he drags the trash can over between his legs so that he can vomit. This is the worst anxiety attack he’s had since--since probably during the months after the  _ Draft _ , and of course one of his more asshole-y upperclassman teammates had to see it. Of course the  _ worst  _ possible person to walk in on him had to decide to hook up with his girlfriend in  _ Jack’s room. _

Jack’s had a hard enough time adjusting to college hockey, and even starting his sophomore year, it’s  _ hard _ . Everyone knows who he is, everyone thinks he used to do coke, and nobody really wants to talk to him--there are a couple of frogs this year who are cool, but that means it’s imperative that they don’t see him like this. Maybe he could go find Shitty. But Shitty is completely wasted, probably still downstairs, and it had to be fucking Campbell and his girlfriend that walked in on Jack. Jack, who had taken four hours that day convincing himself to just  _ try  _ a kegster, for once.

Jack shudders, still trying to find his breath, which has been way too fast for a long time now. It’s just too much--all of the sound and the heat and the sweat soaking through his shirt and somebody grabbing his ass and the beer that someone spilled on him. He can’t process it, and he  _ especially  _ can’t process it and continue to talk to people at the same time. That’s why he’s huddled in his room, vomiting his guts out (and not even because he’s drunk, just because the anxiety he’s been trying to ignore for the last two months has decided that it didn’t want to stay hidden anymore).

He waits until he’s sure Campbell has gone back downstairs with his girlfriend, and then he puts his head between his knees and tries to coach himself through breathing exercises that he learned last year. 

It doesn’t work. Nothing’s working. Jack is never going to be normal again.

He continues to lose his shit until someone else opens his bedroom door, which is when he jerks his head up to see who it is. He sees Lardo, beer-flushed and probably just having won another game of pong. “Dude, this party sucks,” she says, and then focuses on Jack’s face, and frowns. “Woah, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Jack says, and wipes his mouth with the back of his arm. His nose is so stuffed up, it’s actually making his sensory headache worse. He hiccups through his words, and it’s a wonder that Lardo can understand him at all. “Do--you want--to leave?”

“Zimmermann,” she says, and shuts the door behind her. She crosses over to him and sits on the ground, making a face at the trash can he’d puked into. “Dude. You’re losing it.”

Jack covers his face with his hands and mutters, “I  _ know _ .” He has to emerge from his hands, however, when he lurches forward and heaves into the trash can again, only bringing up bile. He tries to say, his voice mangled and completely unintelligible, “I need to go, I shouldn’t have come here, this is a mistake,” and Lardo grabs his arm, trying to stabilize him in some way.

“Holy shit, dude,” Lardo says. She’s clearly doing her best, despite her inebriated state. “Breathe.”

Jack can’t. He only tastes acid and blood from biting the inside of his cheek too hard. 

“Uh.” Lardo is far out of her pay grade. She puts a cool hand on the back of Jack’s neck, and he jumps about a foot in the air at the contact. “Shit, sorry. Should I get...somebody?”

There’s nobody in the Haus or any surrounding hundred miles that Jack trusts enough to ask for, who won’t immediately lose all respect for him--except Shitty, who’s probably having a really good time and doesn’t deserve to have to take care of Jack right now. Jack should be used to getting by on his own (he had convinced everyone he could function under pressure and he promised everyone he could talk himself out of a panic spiral). 

“It’s fine,” Jack gasps. His stomach feels calmer by the second--maybe he just needed to throw up a few times. Vomiting is a thing he’s good at. He wipes his face, and forces a deep breath in, because nobody else is capable of helping him but him. There’s nothing in this room that can end his suffering, at least not while Lardo is sitting there, so he needs to deal with this somehow.

“Do you want to go somewhere?” he asks Lardo a few minutes later, when he’s feeling less dizzy. 

“I was coming up to ask you if you would walk me home,” Lardo says. She hiccups. “But I think I should call somebody.”

“No, I can walk you.” Jack thinks very hard about getting to his feet, but when he looks down, it hasn’t happened yet. It appears that he’s still extremely drunk.

Lardo rises next to him, giving him a very wary look. “Zimms, seriously--”

Jack tries not to visibly  _ flinch  _ at the old nickname, but he doesn’t succeed, and Lardo looks downright spooked at Jack’s spasm. 

“Holy shit,” Lardo says again, mostly to herself. “I’m going to go get someone.”

“Shitty,” Jack manages. 

Lardo nods. She leaves, slipping out of a tiny crack in the door and shutting it tight behind her. 

The room is quiet for the next few minutes. Jack, finding himself gasping for air again, gets out his phone and tries to find where he’d put that new breathing app. He gets a little sidetracked seeing the messaging app, though.

He shouldn’t text anyone right now, Jack tries to remind himself. First of all, he’s drunk. Second, he’s just going to worry someone if he texts them  _ I can’t breathe _ . Third, nobody wants to fucking hear from him. 

(Fourth, there are numbers in his contacts list that he was specifically told to delete.)

Jack opens the app anyway, but then Lardo’s coming back with somebody in tow, and he hears her say, “Dude, don’t text drunk.”

“It’s fine,” Jack says. 

“Uh,” Lardo says. She nudges Shitty towards Jack. “Can you--”

“Yeah. Brah, come on, let’s go home,” Shitty says. Jack is glad he’s the one that Lardo found to help, because Jack forgot that Shitty’s the only one on the team who’s seen one of Jack’s panic attacks before. In addition, Shitty isn’t completely wasted, and actually looks very steady on his feet. “Can you breathe for me?”

Jack inhales through his nose, realizing he’d been forgetting to do that for a while now. 

Shitty walks over, seeming satisfied that Jack isn’t dying, and pulls Jack up, and then snatches Jack’s phone away. “Aw, brah, we are  _ not  _ drunk-texting Kent Parsons right now.”

“I just wanna say sorry,” he mumbles. He makes a weak lunge for his phone, but Shitty easily outmaneuvers him.

“I don’t think you should say sorry while drunk,” Shitty says. He doesn’t  _ get it. _ “We’re going to Lardo’s dorm, Big Z. You ready to go back downstairs for just a second?”

Jack digs in his heels. Just imagining the hot room full of alcohol fumes and sweat makes him feel lightheaded again.

“Breathe,” Shitty reminds him, and both he and Lardo corral Jack out of the room and down the stairs. Jack tries to fixate on Lardo’s hand at his elbow and Shitty’s arm around his waist, instead of the eighty-four people he’s jostled by on his way out.

“Yo, bad trip?” somebody shouts at them, as Jack’s shepherded past. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Lardo tells them, and pushes Jack forward. She thinks she’s helping by defending his honor.

A group of people laugh, as if they can’t  _ believe  _ Jack’s fallen off the wagon so soon in the season. He’s supposed to be the fucking captain, and here he is, a complete mess, crying about not being able to handle a  _ party _ . 

Jack, not having any more bandwidth to deal with that emotionally, completely shuts down.

He pulls himself back together and finds that he’s already in Lardo’s dorm room, on the floor by the bed. The lights are off; the only thing letting Jack see his surroundings is the streetlight outside, and the quiet dark is doing wonders for his panic. Shitty’s holding one of his hands, and Lardo’s cross-legged on his other side, her knee bumping his thigh. Sitting on Lardo’s roommate’s bed are Ransom and Holster, the freshman defensemen. They must have been enlisted to help Jack over here, and he doesn’t remember asking for that help at all. Maybe it would have been easier for everyone if they’d just left him passed out in the Haus lawn, or something.

But he’s come back to himself now, and he shudders his way through a deep breath. Shitty perks up next to him, saying, “Thank  _ fuck _ . Jack, you good?”

Jack nods. He breathes again, and then scrubs at his face in an attempt to wake himself up further. His hands are cold from the fifteen-minute walk he must have taken to get here, and it’s a little alarming that he doesn’t remember any of it (but as long as it doesn’t happen again, it’s probably nothing). 

“Does that happen to you a lot, bro?” Holster asks. Both he and Ransom look a little freaked. 

Jack shrugs. “Um,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to say. His brain is still running at triple speed, too fast for him to fit words together properly, but he does his best. “It--shouldn’t. I mean, it used to happen...more.”

Lardo makes a noise like she doesn’t know how to interpret that, but Ransom seems to at least try to understand, nodding and then pressuring Jack into accepting some water. It’s in a cup with the lax team’s logo on the side, and Jack dimly wonders who stole it.

After watching Jack to make sure he starts on the cup of water, Lardo and Shitty move from his side and stand up. Shitty reaches for the ceiling, looking fantastically sleepy. “Is your roommate gonna be out all night?” he asks Lardo. “More specifically, can he crash here?”

Lardo cuts her gaze to Jack, who’s still looking very un-captainly on the floor, miserably sipping the cup of water at slow intervals. The water is tepid and tastes like someone ran to the water fountain in the common room to get it, which just makes Jack feel worse for being even more of a burden.

She says, like Jack can’t hear her, “I mean, I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”

Jack lurches forward, attempting to set the cup down and get to his feet at the same time. “I can go,” he insists, even as Ransom has to rush to set the cup back upright and Shitty pushes him back down. “I don’t want to impose, I can just go back to the Haus.”

Everyone else in the room seems to exchange nervous looks, and then Lardo and Ransom both start talking. “Nah, dude, I think maybe you should stay put,” Ransom says, and Lardo overlaps him, saying, “I think that’s a really fucking bad idea, Zimms.”

Jack thinks he’s going to be sick again. Somehow, he ends up bent over Lardo’s trash can, though he isn’t sure who scooted it over to him, and he spits bile into the bottom of it. Somebody’s rubbing his back, and it feels overwhelming and bad, but he can’t find the words he needs to say that--he’s been too much of a diva already, he doesn’t want to say much anyway.

He wipes his mouth, and somebody who isn’t rubbing his back guides him to lie down on the ground. Jack wishes people would stop touching him--and then all hands are gone from him, and he’s lying on the ground with a blanket over him and a balled-up sweatshirt under his head, and the door is clicking shut. His teammates seem to be gone, and the room is quiet save for Jack’s irregular breathing and Lardo getting under the covers of her bed.

“Goodnight,” she tells him.

Jack hums in response, not sure what else to do. He could say thank you, or he could apologize for being the worst captain ever, or he could vomit again, but all three of these options only occur to him a few minutes later, when Lardo is already asleep.

 

It’s a couple of days before Jack’s episode gets brought up. This gives him enough time to get on his feet, and avoid taking his anxiety medication, and practice shoving down his emotions into a deep pit in his stomach where he never has to see them again. 

He’s back in the Haus, scrounging for breakfast before practice, when a couple of his friends (? colleagues????) approach him. Namely, Shitty and Lardo, who seem to have told Ransom-and-Holster to take a backseat for this one. 

“Hey, bro,” Shitty says. He claps Jack on the back. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Jack says. He returns the fist-bump that Lardo offers him. “What’s up?”

They exchange a Look. 

Lardo says, rather diplomatically, “We just wanted to check up on you after...Friday.”

Jack closes the cupboard he’d been looking through--it’s only full of eighty bottles of hot sauce, anyway. “Oh.”

Shitty nods. “Yeah, brah, that was  _ nuts _ . Are you feeling better?”

Jack nods back at him. He waits out a semi-awkward silence, and then asks, “Has Campbell....said anything that you’ve heard?”

Lardo jumps to answer, saying, “No--not that I’ve heard.” 

Jack’s pretty sure she’s lying. His chest feels tight. 

Shitty looks guilty, probably seeing that Jack’s face has gone rather blank. “We should head to practice,” Shitty says, as a few other guys clatter down the Haus stairs and out the front door, hefting their bags onto their shoulders. Jack, still hungry, agrees and lets Shitty and Lardo walk him to practice.

He’s never going to a kegster again, that’s for fucking sure.


End file.
